University Art Museum
Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair
August 4 - December 11, 2021
Artists, Installation Views, Public Programs, About

Tanja Hollander

16 images of items: A bunny stuffed animal, A bag of light-bulbs, a photo of a boy, a key, a purple scrunchie, a candle of the number 18, napkin with address, hairclip, earings, photo of a river scene, glasses with case, pen, tape, packet of sugar, playing card, and a paperback copy of Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzche
Tanja Hollander, Ephemera Project (detail), 2020–21, 16 photo printed magnets, 24 x 24 inches each, courtesy of the artist [image description: 16 images of items: A bunny stuffed animal, A bag of light-bulbs, a photo of a boy, a key, a purple scrunchie, a candle of the number 18, napkin with address, hairclip, earings, photo of a river scene, glasses with case, pen, tape, packet of sugar, playing card, and a paperback copy of Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzche].

The fall 2020 semester began like no other on this campus and across the nation. In this commissioned work, Tanja Hollander worked with 10 first-year UAlbany students to document their responses to the pandemic. Despite having only ever met online, Hollander developed tender, trusting relationships with her participants, who mailed their personal objects for her to photograph, which you see here, and written descriptions of the meaning those objects carried for them. The arrangement of these photographs into grids both offers a reassuring structure during a time of uncertainty and echoes the sense of repetition felt during the seemingly endless days of lockdown. Hollander is an artist who works with photography, video, social media, and data to understand cultural and visual relationships, and her work with our students is part of her larger EphemeraProject begun in January 2020 with participants from all over the world. Representing this larger work, the present exhibition includes a selection of Hollander’s collaboration with participants from outside the campus community.

 

Tanja Hollander

Born in 1972 in St. Louis, Missouri. Lives and works in Auburn, Maine.

Selected solo exhibitions include Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2017); McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire (2015); Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York, New York (2013); Carl-Schurz-Haus in Freiberg, Germany (2014); and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine (2012).

Selected group exhibitions include Lived Space: Humans and Architecture at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts (2018); (un)expected families at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Massachusetts (2017); deCordova New England Biennial 2016 at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts (2016); Input_Output. Reinventing Photography at the Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá, Salitre headquarters in Bogatá, Colombia (2016); Freoundschaft at Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, Germany (2015); and Virei Viral at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2013). Hollander was invited to give a TEDxDirigo talk in 2012.

Hollander received a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1994.